It has been made aware to me recently that I in fact love EA Sports games. I concede the point: as a major Tiger Woods PGA Tour fan who also is committed to the FIFA series, was fervent admirer of a new EA-helmed Rugby game and has previously dabbled in the Fight Night and NHL franchises, it was a delightful surprise to find that EA were releasing a follow-up to Grand Slam Tennis for consoles I actually own.

The Virtua Tennis and Top Spin franchises – I’m a fan of the latter – scrap it out in their own little corner of the gaming industry (though Namco Bandai did try to throw a punch a few years back); perhaps EA Canada, off the back of a decent critical reception for the first GST entry, could use their vast sports game experience to encroach on 2K and Sega’s turf?

One thing you’ll note pretty much immediately is the immaculate presentation that the Burnaby-based studio adorn all their games with. Grand Slam Tennis 2 looks bloody fantastic all the time. After gliding through the menus to start playing you’ll notice the playing surfaces change dynamically, an especially impressive detail during clay court matches. Linesmen and women dodge incoming tennis balls, the crowds are decently animated and EA Canada have put a lot of effort into producing a broadcast feel while keeping the general vibe of the matches authentic and as true-to-life as possible.

The menu system is practically lifted straight out of the EA Sports ‘How to Make a Menu’ guidebook but no complaints from me there, pretty much every game has a menu and this is a particularly slick one. Couple this with the aforementioned in-game attention to detail and Grand Slam Tennis 2 becomes a very nice game to look at. Even the players are superbly animated – the likes of Borg, Becker and Sampras during their glory days are present and faithfully depicted – and the venue SFX are damn near faultless. I wish the same could be said for the rest of the auditory experience mind you; the other areas, while similarly pristine and well produced, are best described as circle blocks being pushed into a square hole.

“A key problem is that the AI doesn’t adjust itself to adapt to your play style, leading to you falling into a routine which can only really be enlivened by intentionally changing up your play style on court.”

Commentary is provided by legends of the sport Pat Cash and John McEnroe which on the surface are two sensible choice, the latter in particular what with his Wimbledon off-court credentials. In reality though, their lines come across far more like the commentary you’d associate with films; less as-live analysis and more discussion about the ins-and-outs of tennis, which is for the most part not dynamic and thus jarring. This renders the commentary all but redundant, though this game does fall under the bracket of ‘games you can play while listening to music or podcasts’ so while a tad disappointing is no major loss (there is no in-game soundtrack sadly).

The Total Racquet Control is a good addition that offers a challenge initially in mastering the use of it, and will almost certainly form a part of your overall game even if you prefer pressing buttons to flicking sticks. Regardless of which control scheme you choose to adopt – you can play with both all the time – once you know what button to press when or which direction to push the right analogue stick, the single player component at least loses all challenge. A key problem is that the AI doesn’t adjust itself to adapt to your play style, leading to you falling into a routine which can only really be enlivened by intentionally changing up your play style on court. Not that the game isn’t enjoyable: the gameplay is fun at its core and there are moments where you can heighten the sense of drama through forcefully playing matches as the underdog and inducing long, dramatic rallies through exuberant but returnable lob and drop shots.

Be warned though, there is a substantial gulf between the AI difficulty and the kind of people you’ll find skulking around the online portion that can be described as empty on multiple levels. If you can somehow find a friend who’d like to play this with you, that’s how I’d suggest you experience the multiplayer component of Grand Slam Tennis 2 because otherwise you’ll be experiencing the extremes of the difficulty spectrum. There’s an issue online that you’ll find regardless of who you play though; occasionally you can pull some of the greatest shots out of the bag, only to find that your opponent can inexplicably cover the distance and return the ball to you.

If you approach this game with the foreknowledge that the multiplayer is soon to be a barren wasteland as is the way, Grand Slam Tennis 2 is going to be a largely challenge-free solo experience. The AI doesn’t punish you enough for mismatching your play style with the one designated to the person you choose/create; on top of this, there’s an ‘early or late’ system to let you know how good your timing is when pressing a button or shifting the stick, but very rarely do you make an unforced error from being too eager or too slow. There’s a training mode in the main menu that ultimately serves as little more than a quick slice of throwaway content to expand the mode selection; it’s not necessary to train first but if you want to play exclusively with the right stick it may be worth the twenty minutes it’ll take to complete.

“For the sum of its parts, Grand Slam Tennis 2 is a decent package that is gorgeously presented but simply doesn’t give you enough of a challenge.”

The player creation sharing feature conversely is a surprisingly (albeit inadvertently) effective addition, as other users have uploaded their own depictions of famous players who weren’t included in the official roster. The likes of Andre Agassi, Marat Safin, Thomas Berdych, Jelena Jankovic and Robin Söderling (to name but a few) are some of the players other people have made decent clones of. You can virtualise a favourite player who isn’t on the roster or in the user-created section if you must, the simplified creation zone streamlining the creation process (avoid the still terrible Game Face feature though). What’s particularly great about these user-created players is that they can be used anywhere (career included) except the Grand Slam Classics mode, for obvious reasons.

Speaking of Grand Slam Classics, it’s a welcome genuine game-expanding distraction, a series of mid-match scenarios where you take the place of one of the players in the impressive roster available across all game modes and defeat the opponent. Bonus objectives – usually requiring you to perform a certain number of a specific shot or win rallies – give you more points, which total up across the twenty-five scenarios you can play. There are games from the past thirty years plus a few fantasy match-ups which you’ll probably experiment with yourself in the exhibition mode.

There is a Tournament mode available too but it’s ultimately the Career mode that is the real meaty section of the game, and which may well be the make-or-break mode for many. Just remember that this is a game about the Grand Slams; while there are exhibition games to play that earn you stat-boosting items, they are but the icing on the Grand Slam cake. The four competitions and their preliminaries are multi-tier knock-out tournaments that crop up year-after-year, seeing your ultimate aim to rack up enough career points to reach the No. 1 rank and then defend it.

Problematic considering the lack of difficulty but make your own stat-impaired created player and adopt a more laid back Mansour Bahrami-esque approach to playing and you can stave off boredom easily enough. The training and exhibition matches to boost your player’s stats are filler to the tournaments which offer you the chance to play three lengths of match: 1 set, 3 games/3 sets, 3 games/ 5 sets, 6 games (3 sets, 6 games for women). The reason for this is to give you time to complete bonus objectives for more career points, but more often that not – especially so when you use a created player who will be crucially lacking in some areas – the objectives can be completed or simply not attempted in the shortest available option; the simplicity of the game will make you choose the short option continually.

For the sum of its parts, Grand Slam Tennis 2 is a decent package that is gorgeously presented but simply doesn’t give you enough of a challenge. Were EA to allow EA Canada to tweak the difficulty and bring the formula to a broader tennis game, we could well see an annual series that could rival and even best both Top Spin and Virtua Tennis. For now though, we’ve got Grand Slam Tennis 2: a beautiful, fun game that lacks both challenge and scope.